Culture Connects to the Numbers
March of 2020 was a significant month in all of our lives. Just a few days before the United States shut down, MIT hosted their annual Sloan Sports Analytics Conference. I never went to the conference, but starting as a 20-year-old in 2018, I had always made the drive down to Boston to network with others in hockey. On my third trip down to Boston, I had heard about a great presentation that Joan Ryan had on team chemistry.
Team chemistry? At an analytics conference? When it got uploaded to YouTube, I had to check it out.
In a way, I wish I wasn’t 22 at the time. I hadn’t yet experienced enough in the real world to connect with the message.
On Sunday morning, I was tracking while listening to a podcast on investing. Specifically, on investing in investment firms. There was a quote that made me pause.
People don’t give money to the people they think will be the absolute best returners; they give money to people they like.
In my opinion, there are many parallels between the investment world and managing hockey teams. However, one of the differences between the two seems to be the reliance on numbers. Even by nerds, hockey appears to be an elegant piece of abstract art. It’s a space filled with a balance of chaos and structure. Its results are filled with almost as much luck as skill. In investing, numbers rule. Whether it is spending countless hours trying to build the best discounted cash flows model or thinking high level about cap rates and other simple factors, decisions are supposed to be rooted in the numbers. So why wouldn’t people take the rational route and pick by the numbers for the best future results?
Similarly, from a personal investing side, there is a similar mantra that having an optimal investment strategy is less important than being able to stick to your strategy. By the numbers, it may make sense to be 100% invested in equities at 55, but if you saw your retirement savings drop 35%, can you hold on or will you bail?
Just like in the movie Sully, sometimes looking at things from afar and by the numbers, we miss the human element.
This also goes along well with a meme I saw on hockey Twitter Friday night from failsonmcdonald.
This isn’t to sit here and be an old man ranting into an abyss with no structure about how the kids with their computers don’t get it. Rather, I am gradually exploring and understanding more about “the other side.”
This past week, we saw three historic football coaches step down: Bill Belichick, Nick Saban, and Pete Carroll. Each of these coaches was known for establishing a strong culture, in their own ways, which led to their long tenures of success.
Joe Smith of The Athletic wrote what I think should be required reading for anyone interested in coaching. In 2021, he sat down and discussed culture with Nick Saban, Steve Kerr, Joe Maddon, and Bruce Arians. Ironically, when asked about who guided their understanding of a culture, Saban referenced Bill Belichick.
[Belichick] defined the role that everyone had in the organization. He was very specific in how we were going to do things, and even though we worked extremely hard, we knew what the expectation was.
Belichick’s motto of “Do your job,” was not some catchy slogan, but rather a summation of the decentralized command that he installed in the Patriots organization. By carefully crafting a set of achievable goals and responsibilities for every member of the organization, he gave room for each member to take ownership over their craft and consequently push others around them.
Something that stuck out to me throughout the 2022-23 Bruins season was the focus on process over results. As Nick Saban said, “As soon as you worry about winning as opposed to the next play, that’s when you get in trouble.” By the midpoint of November, you could feel that whatever the Bruins had going, it was special. But when asked about their winning streaks, the players would constantly cite their preparation and focusing on the games in front of them. They didn’t show up asleep against weaker opponents, they kept their foot on the pedal throughout games, and they only lost three in a row on a tough stretch of three games in four nights on the road against playoff opponents.
In Patrice Bergeron’s retirement press conference, he gave small signs that, to him, the game was more about process and improvement than wins in losses. Early on, he was asked whether or not he would be glad to let “the grind” go, to which he answered in a lukewarm manner that there wasn’t any part of the game that he was glad to let go. He also cited that the sign he felt it was time to hang up the skates was that he no longer had the complete motivation to prepare for the games at as high of a level as he normally did. Statistically, there was no signal that Bergeron should have retired. He was still performing like a star. But as soon as he felt he couldn’t give what he owed himself and the team any longer, he moved on to the next thing in his life.
The culture that Patrice Bergeron and Zdeno Chare built and maintained from 2006 to 2023 produced a Stanley Cup, two runner-up appearances, and a pair of President’s Trophies including the league record for regular season wins. And that culture was clearly a tangible thing once it was completely passed on. In his thank you message to Patrice Bergeron, Charlie McAvoy said, “What you’ve built here is special. I promise to do everything I can to take care of it.”
What is misunderstood about culture is that it’s not something that can win on its own. You can’t just take 23 best friends and put them on the ice and they’ll win a Stanley Cup. Using a similar analogy to Tangotiger, talent gets you to the red zone, but a good culture is what you need to get into the end zone.
The 2022-23 Boston Bruins will likely go down, in my mind, as the greatest hockey team of all time. Were they the best team on paper? Probably. But in order to become a record-breaking team, they needed the strong culture that had been cultivated for years.
If there is something I wish we could measure; if there is something I will concede to, it’s culture.